The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen

Just the introduction, but there's enough wrong in it that it is worth writing up, or so I fool myself. I picked this book up knowing I was going to disagree with it, but interested to discover exactly where. So don't accuse me of being unbiased.

Hobbes, as we all know, taught us the meaning of Justice quite some time ago. And yet it is an unpopular definition, since it lacks wiggle room; there is nothing there for smooth-tongued lawyers or slippery politicians or unscrupulous economists.

Sen, to be fair, lays his approval of theft out for all to see early on with a parable: consider three children disputing the ownership of a wooden flute. Child A asserts that she is the only one who can play it, and thus should have it. Child B says that he is much poorer than the other two, and has no other toys, and thus should have it. Child C says that she has spent the past few months making the flute by herself. Hobbes, and I, and any other sane person, immeadiately sees the correct answer; but that is far too simple for the oh-so-sophisticated Sen, who wraps a cloud of squid-ink around a desire to steal the flute and gain the power and prestige that go with allocating it. And all without noting that in the real world, there is a further problem: only C has an unique claim; both A and B would in practice be but examplars of a class of meritless claimants. Back in the real world, he is keen on "patent reform" to make drugs more available to the third world, which is apparently "clearly" part of "global justice", also an undefined term. But if you wish to improve the lives of the poor, and are granting yourself in imagination god-like powers to change the world, why not imagine giving these poor folk western-style govt instead of the hideously corrupt pols currently keeping them poor?

 

Sen would like to contrast what-he-calls a "transcendental" approach (he has been reading too much Kant) with a "comparative" approach. The T-folk seek ultimately just institutions by construction; the C-folk are more interested in comparing outcomes under actual institutions. He claims Hobbes for the T-folk but this is an error on his part (I don't think he has actually read much Hobbes); Hobbes doesn't really design institutions; his work is at a deeper level than that, on the definition of the word. Sen wants his ideas of Justice to guide his social arrangements, in some way; again, he doesn't justify this he rather takes it as given; but I say that on a sub-stratum of Justice you can build many different social arrangements and it isn't at all clear why your Justice should guide these at all.

Sen does not trouble himself with the meaning of the word Justice, treating it I can only assume as well known, since he doesn't even trouble to note that he isn't going to define it. Instead he saying that a starting point will be something like "how can justice be advanced?".

Sen has a lot of time for Rawls, who he regards as the leading political philosopher of our time, which is toss. But he does at least manage to notice what so many others fail to see, that there will not be agreement under the Veil of Ignorance.

He is weakly in favour of freedom: freedom to choose our lives can improve our well-being, and beyond that it may be valuable in itself (my bold).

Anyway, that concludes the introduction.